Fannie Mahood Heath

A century ago, native wildflowers from the prairies of Grand Forks County began taking root in what was a world away from the wild Dakota prairie: the carefully tended flower beds of the Royal Gardens in London, England. These flowers came from an early settler named Fannie Mahood Heath. She had an intimate knowledge of the native prairie wildflowers that surrounded her family's farm, and she shared this with gardeners at home and abroad. By carefully bundling tiny packages of prairie seeds and then mailing them across the Atlantic she put Dakota wildflowers in the hands of gardeners who received them enthusiastically. In this way, the abundant wildflowers of the prairie became specimens in distant gardens.

Fannie Mahood Heath published widely about gardening with native prairie plants on her family's farm, which was just west of present-day Grand Forks. She was a remarkable gardener, but she was also an early prairie naturalist because she knew the native plants of the prairie with a rare mastery. And so she became a kind of keeper of the natives, a wise teacher about wildflowers in the prairie. In the 1920s, she received a note from a fellow plant lover who happened to be the superintendent of London's Royal Gardens. That note sheds some light on her untiring zeal to teach the wonders of native plants to prairie gardeners: "Native plants, like prophets, are not popular in their own country." Fannie Mahood Heath, of course, worked to change that.